1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to text messaging applications and is more specifically related to the exchange of photographs and video using such text messaging applications.
2. Description of the Related Art
Text messages have been sent since 3 Dec. 1992, when Neil Papworth, a test engineer for Sema Group in the UK used a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of Richard Jarvis. In the ensuing decades, billions of SMS messages have been transferred between phones, messages that first contained text messages, then photos, and later videos. In each case the communications has been driven by the sender (the “texter”) sending a message to the receiver, who must respond to the text when appropriate. SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, so messages are often abbreviated and the emotions of both the texter and the receiver are often lost in the brevity of the message.
This lack of emotion in text messages was first addressed with the addition of photographs and later videos to the SMS protocol and to the text messaging applications. But the video and photos are often separated from text, thus blunting the effect.
To resolve this, a number of new applications have arisen in recent years to add emoticons to text messages. A group in Sweden created eMoto to bring emoticons to text messages, and similar work has been published by groups from the Hungarian Academy of Science, AT&T, Docomo Communications Laboratories Europe GmbH, Hiroshima City University, and React Limited. While each of these applications allow the user to insert emotions into their text message through avatars, none show the true emotion on the face of the recipient as the message is read.
EmoText, a MIT Computer Science 441 project in the spring of 2014 discusses the use of facial recognition to interpret the emotion of the receiver of a text message. The emotion is interpreted and an avatar is sent back to the original texter with the emotions.
But EmoText only describes the computer interpretation of the emotion of the receiver of the text message. The actual emotion is lost in the medium of the SMS message. The receiver's face is not seen by the texter.
The present invention, referred to herein by the short-hand expression “FaceBack”, eliminates the issues articulated above as well as other issues with the currently known products.